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1 Fireplace or hearth.

2 Fireplace with flue and vent over it, so including the structure rising above a roof or outside the building. A chimney-stack could be a large structure surrounded by a timber-framed building, where it helped to stabilize the structure as well as providing heat, could be erected over the gable-end, or placed in series along a façade, as in a medieval hospital or almshouse (e.g. St John's Hospital, Lichfield, Staffs. (late C15), with its array of stacks). In Elizabethan and Jacobethan prodigy-houses chimney-stacks contributed to the complex skylines of the composition.

The following terms are associated with chimneys: fireplace (opening of a chimney into a room, whether decorated or not); gathering (part of the flue that contracts with the ascent); hearth (floor of the fireplace); and inglenook (small space beside the chimney, often containing seats, sometimes illuminated by means of a small window, and occasionally having a lower ceiling than in the rest of the room, hence its other name, roofed ingle).